Before I get ugly, which I am afraid I may be,
let me ask you to do me a favor. Sunday, as you know, is Mother's
Day (or is it Mothers' Day?). In any event, in addition to what
you're going to do for your mom, your wife, or someone else's mom on
Sunday I am asking you to do me personal favor.

Please spend one minute and 23 seconds watching
this Mother's Day message from former First Lady Laura Bush on
behalf of the One Campaign.

I watched the first 45 seconds of the scheduled
debate among people who are pretending to be GOP candidates on the
Fox News Channel last night. Bret Bair, the moderator, said the word
"Fox" at least 15 times in those 45 seconds and I clicked over to an
NCIS rerun.

The BIG QUESTION in Your Nation's Capital this
week was: What will be the effect of whacking bin Laden on Obama's
re-election chances 550 days from today?

My general answer has been: "This will have a
half-life of maybe three weeks."

My backdoor neighbor here in Northern Virginia,
James Carville, made it perfectly clear in the election of 1992 that
the state of the domestic economy trumps all else. I'm not sure he
put it exactly that way, but you know what I mean.

The old saying goes, "All politics is local." The
Carvellian Tangent would be "All Economic Data is Local."

What the Dow is doing doesn't matter if your
brother-in-law hasn't been able to find a job in two years.

Where the S&P is won't help if the value of your
house continues to drift down and foreclosures in your neighborhood
continue to drift up.

The Dollar versus the Euro only matters to people
who are not spending somewhere in the vicinity of $4.00 for a gallon
of regular gasoline, because the people for whom it does matter
drive cars which use premium.

The price of an ounce of gold is of no interest
to a woman struggling to buy a couple of boxes of Kraft Dinner and a
pound of ground beef to feed her family of five.

A national debt of Fourteen Trillion Dollars is
meaningless to a working man who is $14 short of being able to pay
the rent after having paid for everything else this month.

If, in August 2012 Main Street America believes
the economy is getting stronger, and unemployment is on a downward
curve then Barak Obama will be re-elected. If they believe the
economy is still barely bumping along, prices are rising, and jobs
are still too hard to find, then he will be a one-term President.

If yesterday morning's jobless claims numbers
were any indication, this is going to be a rough patch for President
Obama.

The Reuters lead was: "The number of Americans
filing for jobless aid rose to an eight-month high last week and
productivity growth slowed in the first quarter, clouding the
outlook for an economy that is struggling to gain speed."

This was on the heels of a report earlier this
week that the U.S. economy "slowed to a 1.8 percent annual rate [of
growth] in the first quarter after a 3.1 percent expansion in the
final three months of 2010."

According to the Clear Capital Housing Index
website: "U.S. home prices nationwide have dipped below the low
recorded in March 2009. A combination of foreclosures and short
sales attracted bargain-conscious buyers in recent months, many
paying in cash and making low-ball offers."

In an inflationary period, people buy things
today because they believe they will be more expensive next month.
It appears that people thinking about buying a home are holding back
because they believe prices will be lower next month, next quarter,
or next year.

With all that depressing economic news in the
hopper, President Obama will not be able to ride on the shoulders of
a gallant group of brave U.S. Navy Seals for very long.

On the
Secret Decoder
Ring today: Links to the jobless claims story, to a site showing
the growth of the national debt in real time, and the website about
housing prices.

Also a license plate Mullfoto and a Catchy
Caption of the Day.

We believe that the Constitution of the
United States speaks for itself. There is no need to rewrite, change
or reinterpret it to suit the fancies of special interest groups or
protected classes.